I’ve received a flood of mail in response to the Oregon shooting and this item on whether the United States is doomed to be the only developed nation that tolerates mass-fatality shootings as routine.

The message quoted below is related to the evocative photo above, showing the moment in 1967 when armed Black Panthers marched into the California state capitol building in Sacramento. (This moment is also part of a great new documentary on the Black Panthers, which its director Stanley Nelson discussed with our editor James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum this week.) This reader imagines what it would be like if today’s Muslims applied a similar approach:

One sentence in your article reminded me of an idea a friend and I have had for a couple of years to combat the NRA. "[The President] highlighting the disproportion between America’s sky-is-falling sensitivity to the slightest potential risk that could be defined as 'terrorism' versus its blasé acceptance of unending home-grown killings." What if gun control advocates combined the two and exploited that terrorism sensitivity?

One evening, my friend, who happens to be of Indian and Sri Lankan descent, noted the potential hypocrisy of many Second Amendment supporters in that all hell would likely break loose if he walked the streets with an AR-15.

Over drinks, we imagined a video project whereby Muslim Americans legally purchase and carry firearms within the bounds of existing laws. However, maybe in the introduction they are wearing hijabs, maybe they are speaking Arabic, maybe they are praying to Mecca. And then with the help of body cameras, you can watch them purchase firearms at a gun show without a background check and maybe watch them buy 5 guns in a month. Pursuant to proper permit, you can watch them carry, either concealed or openly, such firearm(s) to their mosque, to the park or to the grocery store. Lastly, you can watch a group of Muslims Americans fire off hundreds of rounds a minute legally at a gun range.

Additional videos could feature other minority groups which many 2nd Amendment supporters might consider members of the scary "other". A 6'8'' African American male taking an assault rifle to a Black Panther meeting! A bandana and tattooed clad Mexican American with a gun in his low rider. The point being to highlight the deficiencies in the existing system with Americans that NRA members might fear, or at least not be sympathetic to. You can also explain how real undesirables, existing mass murderers or individuals with undocumented mental illness, exploited the system and/or stockpiled firearms and ammo.

If the videos got big enough, it would be interesting to see the NRA's response as supporting everyone's right to easy access to guns may alienate some of their members and supporters.

Both my friend and I are attorneys with young families so while we would actually like to undertake this labor intensive endeavor, there will likely never be the time.

I am a registered New York Republican. My father was in law enforcement for 40+ years and I grew up in a home with firearms, which were properly protected. I believe in the 2nd Amendment but obviously agree with your writings that there are reasonable restrictions that could and should be put in place to reduce the risk of mass shootings. A part of my humanity died on December 14, 2012 as a result of the shooting itself but also the failure to take any steps to prevent further bloodshed. I know it is underhanded to play off the biases of people but if it serves the greater good and results in less death and tragedy, I could look myself in the mirror.

Umpqua Community College alumnus Donice Smith (L) is embraced after one of her former teachers was shot dead. (Steve Dipaola / Reuters)

Three years ago, after the then-latest horrific mass shooting (the one in Aurora, Colorado), I did a short, angry Atlantic item called “The Certainty of More Shootings.” It ended this way:

There will be more of these; we absolutely know it; we also know that we will not change the circumstances that allow such episodes to recur. I am an optimist about most things, but not about this. Everyone around the world understands this reality too. It is the kind of thing that makes them consider America dangerous, and mad.

After that came: the shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, with six people killed; the shooting in a business office in Minneapolis, with six people killed; the shooting in a hair salon in Wisconsin, with three people killed; the Sandy Hook / Newtown elementary school massacre, with 27 children and teachers shot to death; the shooting at Santa Monica College in California, with five people killed; the shootings at the Washington Navy Yard, with 13 people killed; the shooting at Ft. Hood in Texas, with three people killed (which was different from the earlier Ft. Hood shooting, with 13 people killed); the shooting at UC Santa Barbara, with 7 people killed; the shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, with nine people killed; the on-air shooting of two TV reporters in Virginia; yesterday’s shooting outside Roseburg, Oregon, with ten people killed; and of course the countless other gun-death episodes.

I agreed with every word, and with every point of furious emphasis, in President Obama’s powerful statement last night after the latest massacre, in Oregon: His anger at the ritual of saying “our thoughts and prayers are with the families” but doing nothing to prevent further such killings. His stress on America’s status as the only “advanced” society in which mass shootings are routine. His highlighting the disproportion between America’s sky-is-falling sensitivity to the slightest potential risk that could be defined as “terrorism” versus its blasé acceptance of unending home-grown killings. His clear, cold reminder that it is an ongoing political decision by America collectively not to do anything to prevent these killings.

For now, all I can add is views from readers. From one in Los Angeles:

The astonishing chart in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog today, showing that the likelihood of dying in a car crash is severely negatively correlated with education, makes me wonder if the same is true for dying in gun violence. I bet it is.

And I bet that's a major reason there is no serious public policy attempt to stop gun violence. If dying of gun violence were positively correlated with country club membership or levels of investment income, I bet there would be dramatic policy changes tomorrow. But when the victims are poorer, or younger, or less white - those with real power simply do not care. It's heartbreaking and wrong

In real-time chronicling mode, I am putting up this note before completing a search for graphs or studies on this point. I am sure that the reader’s supposition is right it comes to “routine” urban shootings. The mass murders in schoolyards, colleges, theaters, and shopping-malls are different, in making it easier for better-off Americans to think, that could have been me. Worse, that could have been my child. But evidently not enough people have made that imaginative leap to make a political difference.

***

From a reader in Florida:

I have a "modest proposal", ala Swift, as an attempt to get some cultural change in our our acceptance of gun violence.

Fully publicized unretouched crime scene photos. Think for just a second if we all could see what a hollow point did to the head of a child at Sandy Hook... or Aurora... or Umpqua or .... it might get some action.

If we want easy access weapons, we should see what they really do to a human body.

On one hand it's like making folks convicted of DUI's to watch crash movies, excepting that we in the popular culture haven't been convicted of a crime. But then, maybe, we all have been guilty of doing nothing for long enough. It's crazy, I know, but sane proposals haven't worked.

***

From another reader in Florida. An important backdrop point about his message, of course, is that the very sheriff in Oregon running the Roseburg investigation is himself a ferociously outspoken foe of gun-control laws. Here’s the Florida reader, with emphasis added:

There's a really important dynamic that I think gives arsenalists their political power. It's open law enforcement sympathy for the armed faction of American society against the unarmed.

Culturally, I think American law enforcement thinks of itself as protecting the 35 percent of armed Americans against the 65 percent who aren't. It's crazy; but I think it's true. That's because actual police generally come from the 35 percent of American households that own guns. And more importantly, I think most of them probably sympathize with arsenal owners because many of them own their own arsenals. (10+ guns)

As long as police rhetoric and sympathy rests with armed arsenalists and not the unarmed, nothing is going to change. Police overwhelmingly support the laws that allow our debased gun culture to thrive.

It's worth noting that mass shootings are good for the gun business, especially during Democratic administrations. It's similar to how Katrina was a great achievement for the anti-government right. We have got to stigmatize the "gun hustler" industry. We've got to stigmatize the business of arsenalists in a way that splits them from police.

A very long-term project. And we have to come up with the language of seediness and gangsterism, like "gun hustler," to do it. Or at least that's my take. So mass shootings, like street level brutality and the Drug War are all part of the same issue.

***

From another reader, on possible cultural / commercial pressures:

Ernest Hemingway bought a shotgun from Abercrombie & Fitch and then went home and shot himself. After that, A&F stopped selling guns.

It might be effective to start publishing the names of the gun manufacturer and retail store who sold that gun for each killing. Shame is not the best motivator but sometimes it can work. And a policy like that wouldn't require any legislation, just journalist initiative.

WalMart did of course decide to stop selling AR-15 rifles, cousin of the military’s M-16, earlier this year. Unfortunately it is hard to imagine gun-show vendors or local weapons shops being as responsive as the old A&F to a mainstream-media shaming campaign.

***

And, finally for today, perhaps the most sobering observation:

The problem isn't simply that we have too many guns in the US and that the barriers to acquiring one are so low; other countries such as Canada and Switzerland have comparable gun to population rates, and they do it without having a school massacre every year or two.

This school shooting phenomenon is distinctly American; it has become part of our culture, like it or not, one in which kids grow up being told they are the greatest thing on earth, one in which we have killed off all sense of humor for the sake of not offending anyone, one with very poor services for those with mental health problems, and one where now we've seen so many school massacres its well within our normal daily consciousness and cultural dialogue.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

America’s largest internet store is so big, and so bewildering, that buyers often have no idea what they’re going to get.

Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.

There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.

They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

America’s largest internet store is so big, and so bewildering, that buyers often have no idea what they’re going to get.

Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.

There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.

They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.